by Bill Albert
“Should I call the doctor, Harold?”
Aunt Enid. How would he explain this to her? Once his father had come home drunk very late at night. Harold had been woken by his mother’s shouting.
“ . . . just like my father!”
Harold listened, holding his breath. His mother rarely mentioned her father, except when she was very angry.
“Sylvia, come on,” his father begged. “I just had a couple of . . .”
“In the bathroom! You wanna come home like that, you can sleep in the bathroom!”
A door slammed, then silence. Harold lay awake for a long time that night.
“Harold? Was it the corned beef, Harold?”
“What? Ah, dunno . . . I’m going to have a shower now.”
“OK, darling, but be careful.”
Enid tightened the belt of her robe. She listened until she heard the water running and then went into the kitchen and made a pot of fresh coffee. The rich smell helped clear her head.
Harold and Enid and Abe
Maybe It Wasn’t Necessary . . .
When he had finally emerged from the bathroom Harold looked so miserable, so serious, that Enid had felt a wave of real affection for him, affection heightened by her relief that his terminal illness was only a bad hangover. She decided maybe he wasn’t such a hopeless case after all. He did have sort of a nice face. Bright blue eyes and a strong nose. If he smiled more his mouth would be OK too. It was generous and warm. In fact, if he lost a few pounds he could be quite handsome really. She half closed her eyes and tried to transform Harold. She couldn’t quite do it.
It bothered her that these intense feelings for her nephew came only when he was in distress. She thought perhaps that was normal, but she didn’t really know.
Later, in the early evening, she stood in the doorway to the kitchen, the wave of morning affection receding as she watched the light from the TV flicker across Harold’s pale face.
“I’ll be back about eleven o’clock, Harold.”
“Uh-huh.”
Ernie Bilko was setting up yet another elaborate scheme to make money. It involved golf and Colonel Hall and Palm Springs. A sure disaster. Besides it was a rerun. He knew how it ended. Harold leaned back, making himself more comfortable on the couch.
“Did you hear me, Harold?”
He answered without taking his eyes from the screen.
“Yeah. Uh-huh. OK.”
“Are you feeling alright now, darling?”
“Fine. Sure, I’m fine. Thanks.”
When he told her what had happened at the drive-in, at least some of the scenes he remembered, she had laughed and hugged him. Her reaction surprised Harold. He was expecting a lot of yelling, followed by a cautionary sermon. He was beginning to understand that, unlike his mother. Aunt Enid was not one for yelling or for cautionary sermons. That made him think about his mother. Suddenly he missed her terribly and he had gone into his room and wept, less for her than for himself. Loss, abandonment, self-pity, guilt. The emotions all ran into each other and then joined forces with the hangover. He didn’t try to figure it out. Instead he had played his records. Comfortingly, they were always exactly the same—tunes, lyrics, singers, the color of the labels.
He had spent the day being pampered by Aunt Enid. Alka-Seltzer followed by dry toast and tomato juice. He was grateful for her attention, but after a while, when he started to feel better, her concern began to crowd him once again and he retreated as best he could.
Enid checked her hair in the mirror by the front door. She put her lips together and rolled them back and forth against one another to even out her lipstick. She grabbed her purse and opened the door. Harold didn’t move.
“See you later, darling,” she called.
Harold grunted in reply.
Were all teenagers like this, she wondered? She shut the door behind her and walked out to the car.
Harold only looked up when he heard the door close. He liked having the house to himself. He could be free from Aunt Enid’s attention, from her solicitous interruptions. Outside he heard her starting the car. He waited a few minutes then got up and went into the kitchen. He looked out the window. The car was gone. He took a bottle of Coke out of the refrigerator and opened it. Grabbing a large bag of Fritos he went back into the living room. He was prepared for a relaxing evening. Alone with some good food and the TV.
Bilko had finished and What’s My Line was beginning. He never understood why anyone would want to watch this. Four old farts trying to guess what someone did for a living. Who the hell cares, thought Harold. He bent down and switched channels. Dinah Shore was on Channel 4. That wasn’t much better. Worse. A current affairs program was on ABC and on Channel 5 there was the news. He never watched the news. Boring stuff. He turned off the set.
Back in his room he put on a Muddy Waters record, “I’m Your Hoochie Coochie Man,” Chess, 1953, blue and silver, flip side “She’s So Pretty.” It was one that Alvin had insisted he buy. He hadn’t particularly liked it at the time. He asked Alvin what a Hoochie Coochie Man was. The blind man had laughed, his lopsided mouth opening to expose brown-blotched gums and the scars on his face twisting like snakes. Harold shuddered. Alvin felt for him and dug his fingers into the boy’s soft forearm.
“A regular loverman, little piss-ant. Sure enough, a regular nigra lov-er man! That’s right. Yeah it is. Shee-it! You’ll find out about it one day soon coming. You surely will.”
He laughed again, a trail of spit landing on the leg of Harold’s pants. Harold didn’t like it when Alvin grabbed hold of him and laughed his busted-mouth, blind-man’s laugh. He liked Alvin’s airborne slobber even less.
He lay down on his bed, closed his eyes and listened. The hard blues beat, the gravelly, but somehow sweet and slow, low-down sound of Muddy Waters and the shrill phrasing of Little Walter’s harmonica helped clear his mind.
However, it wasn’t long before it began to fill up again.
It had been over a month since he had bought a record. Maybe Aunt Enid would let him go up to LA on the bus. He could stay with one of his friends. But, where was he going to get the money? He only had a few dollars left after the drive-in. At home his father had given him a weekly allowance and on Saturday afternoons he had helped out in Mr. Jenkins’ grocery store filling shelves, sweeping the floor, cleaning the windows, delivering groceries and listening to Mr. Jenkins’ complaints about Ralphs and Safeway and his stories about the war. The complaints were always the same—the big monopoly chain stores were making it impossible for the little guy to make a decent living. The stories were always the same too.
“You should have seen ‘em, Harold. Stinking dead Japs were all over the place. The islands were just crawling with ‘em. In the trees, in the foxholes, behind bushes, all over the place. Smelled terrible. I remember that smell. Rotting things. Dead bodies. Terrible darn smells.”
He didn’t miss the afternoons with Mr. Jenkins, but he did miss the money. Could he ask Aunt Enid for an allowance? Could he find a Saturday job in Palm Springs?
He reached under the bed and pulled out a rumpled copy of Playboy. He could feel his erection starting before he found the centerfold page. He put his hand down the front of his pants to help it along. He thought about the girl at the drive-in. She seemed to like him. He tried to imagine her without any clothes on, but all he could see was a mouth full of metal-clad teeth. He saw his aunt, her breasts swinging heavily as she climbed out of the pool, nipples puckered from the water. He tried to concentrate on the girl in the magazine. Angie, who was 22 years old, liked horses and riding motorcycles. Things that rubbed up between her legs. She had long smooth legs, large firm breasts. Before he could get very far into his masturbatory fantasy, the doorbell rang.
He sat up and hurriedly shoved the magazine under the bed. He hoped it wasn’t Earl. He had escaped relatively lightly from the drive-in
and he had no intention of going out with them again. He sort of liked Earl, but his friends were trouble. They were just the kind of boys his mother was always warning him about.
“Gangsters, Harold. Gangsters I’m telling you. Nogoodniks. You want to end up a garbageman, a ditch digger, or a gas station attendant? Huh? Do you?”
He didn’t need the warnings, and anyway, it wasn’t the future that worried Harold, it was the potentially violent present. He had steered well clear. Until Palm Springs that is. He hadn’t worked anything out, but he would have to think of some way to avoid Earl and his friends.
The doorbell rang again. He got up, went into the living room and opened the front door. Harold relaxed. It wasn’t Earl, just an old man. Harold turned on the outside light. The old man squinted into the sudden glare, put up his hand to shield his eyes.
“Mrs. Carlson in?” the man asked.
“Not home,” replied Harold, starting to close the door.
“I see.”
The old man smiled warmly at Harold. Harold noticed that his two front teeth were broken. They had jagged edges and were yellowed like old piano keys. Gray stubble on his face, a wide-lapeled suit creased and dusty, as if he had been walking slowly down a country road on a hot day. He wore a tie and what seemed to be a fairly clean white shirt, his sparse gray hair shiny wet and combed straight back. An effort to look respectable. It didn’t really work. Harold looked at his shoes. His father always said that that was the first thing a salesman did when sizing up a customer.
“If you got clean shoes, Harry, you’re a good bet and they treat you decent. It means you take pride. You know what I mean? Dirty shoes? They don’t want to know from dirty shoes. You just remember that, son.”
Harold did remember. Surprisingly, by the salesman’s test the old man was apparently a good bet. There was a little dust, but his brown wing-tips were highly polished. So much for that piece of advice, thought Harold.
“You her son?” asked the man.
“Nephew,” answered the boy uneasily.
The old man’s smile broadened. He took a step closer and held out his arms as if he were going to grab him. Harold backed away quickly and slammed the door shut.
He leaned against the closed door, his heart pounding in his throat and listened. He could hear the old man laughing. The laugh soon became a cough, deep and hacking. It went on for some time.
“Please, son, open the door,” the old man pleaded breathlessly.
He was not about to open the door. The old man looked dangerous. There were a lot of crazy people around, especially in the desert.
“Go away now,” Harold yelled. “Or I’m going call the cops.”
“Please, just open the door. I’m a sick man. Please, I need a drink of water.”
As if to illustrate his point he began to cough again.
“Who are you?” shouted Harold. “Wadda you want?”
“Open the door and I’ll tell you. I can’t talk though a closed door, yelling like a fishwife out here in the street. You want all the neighbors should hear? Come on son, I’m not going to hurt you, I promise. Cross my heart.”
Harold set the chain and only then did he open the door. He looked out through the two-inch gap. The old man was standing about three feet away leaning against a metal post, still smiling, his face sickly pale in the direct light. He began to pat the dust off his suit coat and pants.
“Damned desert gets all over you, doesn’t it?”
Deep lines cut down the sides of his face, the collar and cuffs of his shirt were frayed, the suit was too big and hung lopsided from one shoulder. Everything about him, except his shoes, seemed secondhand and off-center. Even his nose had been broken and pushed over to one side.
“OK,” said Harold, “What?”
“Can I come in a minute, maybe? Talk inside.”
Aunt Enid would kill him if he let this strange, dirty old guy into her house.
“No,” Harold said, “can’t do it, sorry.”
The old man shook his head and smiled ruefully.
“Tell me something, will you please? Is this the way to treat your own grandfather?”
Abe Cohen sat at the dining room table cradling a mug of coffee. His hands shook slightly. Now that he was inside Harold realized that not only did he look strange, he also stank. A raw mixture of cigarette butts, whiskey, rank body odor, and piss. Harold opened the sliding glass door to the patio and tried to find a position upwind from his grandfather.
“Did you know you had a grandfather, Harold? Did the girls tell you about me?”
“Sort of, um, I mean, not really very much I guess.”
How could he tell him that his mother only mentioned him when she was very upset and then only to use him as a curse, a doom-shrouded vision of Harold’s certain future.
“A bum, Harold. You want to be like him, a rotten, no-good bum? Just keep it up. I’m warning you, you just keep it up like you’re doing and you’ll see how it turns out.”
Harold knew the story of how her father had abandoned them during a cold New York winter. How she and her sister had had to leave school and go out to work. How her mother had suffered. The Depression, always it was the Depression. Every time he complained about something he got the Depression.
“Kids today, they don’t know how lucky. When I was your age, Harold I . . .”
And now, here he was, across the table from him sipping coffee. The Curse of the Cohens, as his father called him. This crazed-looking old man was actually his grandfather, the only blood relative he had besides Aunt Enid. Harold studied him closely, but he saw only an old drifter in hand-me-down clothes. Why had he come? What did he want? What was Aunt Enid going to say?
“Well, listen, it was a long time ago,” Abe said with a shrug. “I had to go look for work, if you hear what I’m saying. In the Depression it was. You’ve heard about the Depression? Yeah, well it was very tough to find a job. It hasn’t been easy for me, Harold. You can write that down in your book. No, not easy for an old man. Do you think I could have another cup of coffee, Harold?”
“Sure.”
The old man crossed his legs. One sock rolled down to reveal a hairless ankle covered in liver spots and patterned with finely broken blood vessels. He scratched vigorously at his arms, his chest. It was as if he wanted to tear off skin. Harold imagined lice.
He got up and went into the kitchen.
“Maybe you have some bread and cheese?” the old man wheezed pathetically. “I haven’t eaten since I left LA. Not that I’m very hungry or anything like that. Used to like to eat. Sort of lost interest somehow. But a little something, you know what I’m saying? I won’t say no to a little something.”
From the kitchen Harold watched him sizing up the living room, assessing how his daughter was doing. He continued to scratch himself. Harold began to itch. He’d never seen a lice. Or was it louse, like with mouse?
“You want it grilled?” he asked.
“Thanks, that would be nice.”
Like with mice, Harold thought, putting the pieces of bread in the toaster. When they popped up he peeled off two slices of Kraft cheese and dropped them between the toast. He put it in the oven and turned on the grill. Harold knew instinctively that his grandfather had not just dropped in to say hello and get a bite to eat. Something far more serious was about to happen. He couldn’t quite get it in focus, but he was increasingly uneasy.
“You know, Harold, I can’t say I like the desert. Not what I’ve seen of it anyway. Coming down on the train it seemed so empty, so far away from anywhere. You hear what I’m saying? You like it here, in the desert?”
“It’s OK,” Harold said, not wanting to give too much away.
Harold put the grilled cheese sandwich on the table in front of his grandfather. The old man bent his head and sniffed it. Harold thought he was going to complain,
maybe send it back like his mother used to do when they went out to eat. If it wasn’t just the way she wanted it, back it went.
“You call this medium rare? I specifically asked for medium rare, didn’t I, Norman?”
Going out to eat with his parents made Harold very nervous. Once he had even complained about it. Once.
“Whose side are you on, Harold? The cook’s or your own mother?”
There was no answer to that.
The old man picked up the sandwich and began to eat.
“How did I find you?” he asked, the words edging out around bits of half-chewed sandwich. “I bet you’ve been dying to ask. Huh? An old man like me, how did I find one of my daughters and my grandson? Huh? Ha ha!”
He seemed very pleased with himself. Harold didn’t reply. What could he say? Abe tapped the side of his head with his forefinger.
“Smart, that’s how, the old man is still smart. You believe that, don’t you, Harold?”
He took a large bite from the sandwich.
“By the way, how’s your dear mother?”
Harold sat down heavily.
“Don’t you know?”
“Know? Know what?” said Abe, slowly placing the half-eaten sandwich on the plate.
“There was a car accident . . . on the freeway, about a month or so ago, and . . .” his voice caught. “My father too.”
“It was bad? Very bad?” Abe asked.
Harold nodded.
Abe’s body went slack, his eyes dulled.
“Oh my God. Oh my God,” he said in a soft abstracted voice. “Sylvia, my poor little Sylvia. My little girl. So pretty. All these years. All these years gone . . .”
Harold felt a lump in his throat, felt the tears coming. He fought against it. He wasn’t going to cry in front of a stranger, even if he was his grandfather. He didn’t understand why, but he felt that to give the old man any kind of emotional opening would be a mistake.
